User blog:DystopianMe/MyTona Marketing
BACKGROUND This article concerns MyTona as a company and their salesmanship/marketing abilities as it relates to the Seekers Notes game. Your author (DystopianMe... thank you, thank you... save applause and questions to the end please) is from the USA and will be using examples from the USA. I will try to make this understandable to those who may not have a free market tradition but am likely to fail at that. My primary purpose is to make it relevant to game play. Like it or not, how MyTona makes money does effect how you play the game whether you financially contribute to them or not. : A FREE GAME Seekers Notes is a free game. It is free to initially download, free to play and (as MT constantly tells us) has free upgrades. It provides its basic units of internal currencies (more on that in the next chapter) free but not in abundance. It doesn't take long on the wiki to meet players who have never paid a $ to MT and have risen to high levels of experience. Some have used special manipulations (enough said, what they do is outside the scope of this article) to play all that they want but some have not. Unlike many other 'free to download' games, there is no barrier within the game that requires anyone to pay MT anything. And yet Google Play often lists SN as one of the Top 10 Grossing games. In less marketing terms that means that it brings in a lot of $$. Google itself is a top grossing company based on a free service so it knows what its talking about. How does a free game generate real world $? There are two current strategies used by companies like MT- 'in-app purchases' and 'in-app advertising'. Up to this point MT has exclusively used voluntary in-app purchases. They recently launched a trial of in-app advertising that you can opt out of but that is new and outside the scope of this article. : THE ECONOMIES WITHIN THE GAME There is a wealth of things of value within the game and everyone decides their own value scale for despellers, fixers, collection items, chests... But three items are general stores of value like currency is in the real world. The most obvious but least useable is coin. Coin is created by solving puzzles or collecting on trophies or item collections. It can also be bought with rubies. Coin is consumed by the craftsmen to create things such as banishment items, complex fixers, reagents (items used to create others) and talisman. As such it can assist with game play or be turned into energy. It is a side market and often ignored. More central to the game is energy (green lightning bolt). While friendships and crafting don't use energy at all, energy is required for advancement in the core game. It is like breathing, the need can be reduced and even stopped for awhile but it can't be ignored. MT provides 480 units per day and successful game play produces more in the form of talismans, level-up bonuses (player and location) and the ability to occasionally purchase more. How a player handles energy defines their game play. The third general store of value is rubies. MT treats the ruby as the currency of the game. Virtually everything can be bought with rubies including coin, talismans for energy, game aides, improved crafting and access to locations. A few rubies are provided at the start, a few come from player levels and MT actions like updates. Neither coin nor energy can be converted to rubies but rubies easily convert to coin , energy, tools, location access, crafting access and more. The game can be played successfully without the use of rubies but the majority of MT marketing involves rubies. : MARKETING Sorry this is so delayed but recent RL events and MT's continual adjustments in marketing have made this section much more general than I had planned (and collected data for). Marketing is the shadow world between psychology and economics. Let me pick on car dealers (an easy target). You buy a car partially based on their special offer for new customers. A great savings, welcome to the family and you scoot out the door with the dealership logo above the bumper. Two years later you get a postcard about their "loyal customer" deals. Does the brand/dealership value new customers or repeat customers? The answer is yes! What they value is the deal and your spending your money with them. And as long as they have not lied to you and the vehicle is not a lemon (bad product) then you still have a deal and product that you are happy to have. Seeker's Notes is a "top grossing" "free" game. Free is the new customer deal. It becomes "top grossing" only if players decide that MT's pop-up loyal customer postcards or in-app store offers something of value. They will not longer be top grossing if they lie, burn out the customer base or don't offer anything of value for long enough. I propose that every thing they tell you is true. In general you do get a better deal if you buy in bulk, buy chests and buy in rubies. For every RW money transaction processed they pay a transaction fee to the financial middlemen. So they lose money for the quick $1.99 deal compared to the $20.00 or more ruby special. That doesn't mean that they might not have a great small cash value deal but such deals are limited. Many people find that the bulk ruby buy with a 2X or 3X talisman converted as needed to magnifing glasses (10 or more at a time) beats the majority of under $5 cash deals. MT knows you as a customer, especially your inventory and buying habits. This is actually very useful but can give the marketing a bad reputation. Consider a grocer who knows when you run out of bread and has a display right at the register with all loaves %20 off. The same thing happens when MT sees you are low in energy (food deals pop-up) and rubies (you "find" a 2X or 3X talisman). MT knows your general location so holidays are "celebrated" with special deals. One recent holiday put MT's marketing in a bad light. Various deals were posted and compared because a valued talisman was included. What seemed like the same deal had a wide range of prices. Under investigation it was found in some cases the chest pictured had different contents. But some were exactly the same, however the buying pattern of the players was different. Make no mistake- you only get a 1st time buyer deal once. If you want the very best deal discard your game and download a new one or make no purchase for a long, long time. While waiting consider the value of the offers going by. Value is the driving force behind marketing. People only trade cash for something they value more. And what players value is highly complex and diverse. There are players who appreciate the pure art of the game and will contribute to it. There are players who consider the time spent in the game a better value than a movie and will gladly pay to have additional energy. Most players respond to the challenges and value accomplishing some goal. Some will pay alot for access passes to be one of the first to complete an event. Some pay a little for tools to avoid the frustration of being one item short of completing a location. Player motivation is complex and individual so MT trys to offer something for everyone. Thus the marketing itself changes frequently. What MT can't do is provide everything to everyone. Players trade cash for what amounts to a few bits changed in a computer database. MT could make money by offering unlimited tools for a one time payment of $1.00. Players would initially think this is great but quickly find the challenge and feeling of accomplishment gone. There would be no new updates. Darkwood would be totally consumed by the fog. No one would win anything of value. That may be an extreeme example but when you see someone asking for MT to change something ask yourself... does that make the game more challenging and interesting... or easier and boring. MT doesn't produce anything of physical value so they have to find a way to make the game interesting and of value to the players. Our response to their marketing is how they know they have done that. : OTHER WAYS TO PAY Pop-up and the store are not the only ways to support the game (and maybe get something back). MT continually runs contests and promotions on Facebook, Twitter and other social gizmos. This gets the word out that they are active and popular. You can opt-in on outside advertizing or watch commercials for additional rubies. You can subscribe to special deals. All of these are restricted to certain devices or markets. I will not review them because I dont have every device and unlimited money. : What do you find of value? To help newer players decide what is worth buying please respond with what you have found that is worth buying and how you deal with MT changing marketing. Keep in mind that this is marketing, a lot of things are 95% off whether the count of that item is 50, 100 or 150. Category:Blog posts